I am now a convert to the Church of Volt Driver. I initially ignored the weapon because it takes a long time to reload, it has a slow fire rate, and it requires a six-week training course to reload the thing. You reload the bullets by tapping R, but you recharge its energy by HOLDING R and tapping the fire button until the meter is full, which is different from the meter of the OTHER electrical thing you have to pump to keep charged. If you don’t have the energy high enough it will still fire, but will do almost no damage. You can overcharge it, but the overcharge dissipates quickly.

It might not sound complicated, but in the context of fighting a swarm of foes this is about four more steps than I want between me and the point where I can murder things.

But based on feedback from a lot of you, I gave it another try. It has turned Metro 2033 into a point-and-click adventure. Just equip the volt driver and then click on the monster you want to remove from the game.

Um,Josh,why do you need filters?You can finish the game with a single filter.You are an exploit master,so why arent you using the gas mask exploit?

For those that dont know the exploit:You can put on your gas mask,then immediately take it off,walk around for about 30 seconds,then put your mask on,and immediately take it off again,and so on,and so on.

On Ranger Easy, they’re really not. I had to use the same exact glitch to get through one of the latter parts of the game since I was constantly running out of filters. Could probably have been easier if I’d bought more at what was probably the last shop selling them in the whole game as I recall, but I thought I was being smart by saving my military grades. Though saving them did pay off later, it really made the game a pain in the ass to play for a while.

The best mod for your weapons in last light is the thing that allows the pressure to stay overcharged until you shoot.Though its a shame what they did with the pumping animation in that game,because here its really awesome,like you are struggling to actually pump it,but there its just like pushing a button.

This was actually my first guess for a silenced revolver, but it leaves out one very important detail: the Nagant takes an eternity to reload.

This is because the cylinder is seated straight into the gun and isn’t capable of spinning out to one side (ala modern revolvers) or breaking down the middle (as you see with cowboy guns). That means to reload a Nagant you have to detach the gun’s miniature ram rod, spin the cylinder to expose one bullet at a time, poke out the spent casing, replace it with a new one, rotate the cylinder again, and repeat this process five more times. ~90 seconds later, you have six more shots of middling power.

I can see how this worked out just fine in reality, especially during the October Revolution, but as a video game weapon it is destined for a life of scorn and frustration.

Thankfully, the lunatics at KBP in Tula have solved this problem in a more elegant fashion: Silent Bullets.

Addendum: For those who don’t know what a “Blue Thunder” is, ask your parents. Parents, be sure your child is mature enough to learn about “Blue Thunder” for the first time. This could also be a good opportunity to bring up the sensitive subject of “Airwolf.”

Yeah! Rescue rangers!
Went on Youtube and watched a few of the episodes… definitely suffers from nostalgia tarnish.

Chris: “They’re basically all the same, I mean that’s what happens after the appocalypse…”

Well, I kind of feel like that would be both true and not true. Wouldn’t the town materials be drawn from the local supplies? If there’s a lot of heavy industry nearby, you’d expect to see lots of slabs of steel. Likewise a station near, say, skyscrapers might have lots of tinted glass around. On the other hand, there does seem to be a lot of mass-produced merchandise that would tend to converge the designs of the different settlements.

In any case, it seems like the developers did a good job of it.

Also, DL, you’re a terrible person and you should feel bad about yourself. :)

Arrrrggg!
Sorry, but your pronunciation of Kyiv* bugs the heck out of me, Chris. :P
Those dastardly Russians spelled it on the maps Kiev, and pronounced it that way, but it’s actually Ukraine’s city; Hands off! :)

As someone who’s only played Metro 2033 for the first time ever last week (to completion, in a single week, and now I don’t remember why I took so long in the first place), I started using the pneumatic arrow gun based on earlier Spoiler Warning comment thread feedback and I had pretty much the same experience. It’s basically an infinite-ammo silent insta-kill launcher against humans.

I’d heard the Library was notorious for its difficulty, but even ham-fisted gorilla mutants can only take so many arrows to the fur before they realize they’ve got better things to do.

I know I’ve mentioned this in a previous post some months ago, but when I first played Metro 2033, I had turned off tutorials. As a result, I had no idea how to pump a pneumatic weapon or even that pumping was an available action. The key bindings menu doesn’t list actions tied to ‘hold down the key’ button presses.

I just thought I’d pop in and point out that the nagant m1895 isn’t a particularly rare revolver, what with the russian military using it for more than fifty years. Considering that their reputation says that it’d take some effort and a hammer to break one, one showing up in a post-apocalyptic russian subway wouldn’t particularly surprise me.

Sorry, but to me that sounded horrible. After 10 seconds (literally, 3 sec at the start and 7 sec further into the song) I had to turn it off.

A good remix is as much a art unto itself as an the original it’s based on. And that remix was not good at all, it was horribly overcompressed. Then again I find remixes and cover versions bad 99% of the time. Take for example Johnny Cash’s Hurt, the original by Nine Inch Nails is much better.

I have even disliked re-recordings done by the original artist.
And this is not me being an ass to other artists. I’ve actually deleted (permanently) several albums worth of music (that I composed) myself that I felt was not good enough to keep.
Of the music I’ve released, only a few songs are close to anything I’d call being proud of, the rest is just meh, and quite a few I regret releasing even.

There has never been so many musicians before as it is today, and the quality/originality has never been as low as it is today. The games industry suffer from the same. (just to get thing kind of back on topic again).

The monsters in the book normally aren’t described much – Artyom barely sees them, and when he does, it’s normally a very quick, adrenalin filled moment. Some of the other books go into more detail, and from everything together you can kinda figure that Nosalises in the game look like the ones in the book. They could have made them a lot more interesting, though, especially since they look so close to all the other melee-based monsters in 2033. Watchers aren’t bad. They look a bit more interesting.
Last Light actually has a lot more variety, especially in behaviour – there are enemies that only attack if they outnumber you 3:1, those are small buggers that like to disappear in holes. They appear in this game, too, but are more of a nuisance, since they always attack in those random run-by attacks that won’t kill you and leave enough time to regenerate for the next attack.

I thought that the Nosalises were kind of interesting looking in the face. They’ve got that tapir snout thing going on there.

Also I don’t know if this episode is from the last block of episodes, but I really don’t think the points correspond to a morality system. You get points for doing things that indicate Artyom being curious and thoughtful. There’s some where doing the moral thing gives you the point, but I can think of one situation off the top of my head where taking an immoral inaction gives you the point.

Just to put this in, you don’t usually get high from smoking hookah. If you’re not accustomed to it, you can pass out though.

Also, as someone who read the books, I believe that the only two monsters you really get a good description of are those guys in Library and the Dark Ones. But it was a while since I’ve read Metro, so I might remembering it wrong. The book was definitely focused more on psychological and “supernatural” threats.

I’m noticing something very weird about the populated areas in Metro: there are children, but never families. There are hookers, but no mothers. There are little boys in abundance, but no little girls.

Is there some message there? Is it an artistic choice to make everything seem that much more bleak and gritty? Some sort of unconscious bias from the developers? Were there originally supposed to be more types of citizens, but they ran out of time/money?

I am not sure why this stood out to me (other than the fact that it’s just really odd), but it bugs me every time I think of it. So… Enjoy! Now it can bug you too!

I think the sequel fixed some of this.
I might be remembering this wrong, but I’m pretty sure I saw little girls just as often as boys, and there were a couple more fleshed-out female characters.
…but there was also the conga-line of topless women, and even more prostitutes.
I’d say at least a small part of it is/was developer bias.
Eastern european countries are still a bit conservative in the way that sexual norms, gender roles/steryotypes/etc are viewed.
e.g. Russia and LGBT rights.

Alright, I think you’re misunderstanding our criticism. We compliment many aspects of the mental threat–I compliment how personal it is to Artyom, Shamus likes the implications that Bourbon sees something different, we’re all interested in the parameters of what it is and how it works.

The problem is that the fail states aren’t communicated well to the player, and that finding one of these fail states means replaying the whole sequence over again, which means it loses a lot of its drama and strangeness–the very things that should make it cool.

Frex, a better implementation could have had the red light /damage/ you repeatedly, rather than kill you. (It doesn’t even need to do permanent damage or even be able to actually kill you – the red flashes and pained sounds do mighty fine on their own.)

I also find that the death just wasn’t well-communicated. It would’ve been perfectly sensible to have the player fall into a pit or be crushed by some other part of the environment mid-hallucination to explain why the scary half of the dream resulted in an instant death while the shiny half was harmless to you.

When you’re randomly offered a choice between a banana and a pancake, it helps to show that the pancake is sitting on top of an antipersonnel mine when you go to take a bite if the intent is for one of these abstract choices to kill you.

I’m surprised actually no one has commented on what I feel is the biggest failiure of communication to the player, which makes me feel like an idiot.

Namely that the devs don’t really do anything to distinguish between “The Dark Ones” and “Mutated Monsters”. I mean early on in the game a scared dude says “The Dark Ones will kill us all, we must defeat this threat”, and then you are immediatly attackhed by Pig-Snout mutants. Surely I can’t be the only one who felt that “The Dark Ones” was a catch all term for the aggressive mutants you just want to rip out your entrails?